A CAULKING by Justin Noga
My head had become a drummed-upon thing. A man in the road bends to it and prods a pain on top. I hear a noise from the man that in my better days I could have determined to be a worrisome noise, yet the man says, There is no worry. Your head is sound. Then he changes tack. Before us the road lies jutted and cracked and in need of severe soothing. Says to me, The road needs caulking, and as you are here I will show you how. I ask, Where are the other workers? and the man simply smiles. He swipes a metal swab into the tar—is it tar?—and scrapes it on a crack, and a worrisome sound of metal on rock wriggles into the pain on top. Swab shifts from bucket to blacktop and back again. The man hands me the swab and the tar drips off the tip. The tar is not tar but it is close to tar. Inside the crack in the road I see a fingernail. I look at my hand. A fingernail is missing on the smallest of the digits. The sizes are mismatched but I pick up the fingernail and try to swab it on me—but the man interrupts with a worrisome noise. No, he says, Swab over there. He says, Do the work and you become the work. I worry, though. I shoe this flake of a nail back into the crack and do as the man tells me. And for the rest of the day it was as he said it would be: I became the work. I lived for the tar I did not believe to be tar. He said I was bold, bold like a pretzel bag on sale that feeds the full kin. I wonder, the man says, Do you have kin? Below us I watch the fingernail bubble up from the caulk and so too do I try to surface.
Come home with me, he says, and what else can I say?
There at the front of a long white shed his daughter takes our hands in the door, kissing each fingertip. From her lips they come out clean of tar. She presents her own fingers, pristine and floured, and the man kisses her dusty tips and I follow his lead to what was dry mere seconds ago. Her fingers: sound and pink. Mine: I miss the fingernail. I ask, Is it the tar that took mine? She says, What tar? On the stoop we share a bag of pretzels and look out at the roads. The man suggests a befitting experience for the young: Daughter becomes Wife, Guest becomes Husband. He asks, What are your opinions of this exchange? The moment brittles the stoop. Daughter leans over, licks my smallest empty digit and says, I believe it to be befitting. My head prods a pain but I find joy swelling outward so much it drips out of my nose onto my shirt and I want to sleep on the porch but the night is so young, too, and so they strip me bare of my shirt and I go to the new Wife in the back of the shed. There is a bed there. There is a salve there. The man who is now Father weathers the night in a wicker chair wedged into the shallow closet, a bag of pretzels in his lap to empty over the quick show. Father soon snores. The bedsprings still. A moment brittles between us, Husband and Wife, the nightlight shining a yellow mood. We can talk now, she says. And the Wife asks, Can I see your hatch? and I wonder her meaning until she pulls my head toward her and parts my hair and sounds out a noise not worrisome but close to it. She parts her own scalp and shows me her own hatch. Describe mine, she says, and I run my fingers along the swell and say I do not have the words. She says, Draw it on the sheets. I spit out onto my hand and brush it on the cloth, my finger a swab, the sheets the crack, the tar not tar but close to it.
Justin Noga is a writer out of Akron, Ohio. His work can be found in Conjunctions, Bennington Review, BOOTH, The Arkansas International, Northwest Review, Reed Magazine, Witness, and elsewhere. Find him at justinnoga.com, and on Instagram@jus.tin.no.ga, the latter being primarily dogs. He lives in Arizona.
23 August 2024
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